Professional Employees and Union Democracy: From Control to Chaos

[Excerpt] Much of the research on union democracy and almost all of the press coverage focuses on abuses of power at the top of the organization. I look at a case at the opposite end of the democracy spectrum. After an insurgent challenge to an established executive director toppled him from power, the chaos of democracy was unleashed in this small union of professional workers. The turmoil experienced by this organization for most of the past decade demonstrates that the democracy dilemma in unions cannot be successfully resolved by effective use of the democratic process alone and raises tentative questions about the bottom-up, rank-and-file insurgency approach to union transformation. Section II reviews relevant research on union democracy and the democracy dilemma. Section III looks at attributes of professional workers and the implications for unions that represent them. Section IV summarizes the experiences of the League of Creative Artists, a fictitious name for a real union going through a democracy crisis. The final section offers a brief analysis and suggests possible implications

Managing Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) Data

Where should students store data after they have completed their Electronic Thesis or Dissertation (ETDs)? The MetaArchive Cooperative has created the ETD+ Toolkit as an approach to improving research output management. This session will cover best practices in data curation and digital longevity techniques that will help students and faculty identify and offset risks and threats to their digital research footprints. We will discuss what to do with the data, how to handle copyright, version control, data organization, file formatting and metadata as well as where should these things be stored

Data Rescue & Curation Best Practices Guide

he aim of the Data Rescue & Curation Best Practices Guide is to provide an accessible and hands-on approach to handling data rescue and digital curation of at-risk data for use in secondary research. We provide a set of examples and workflows for addressing common challenges with social science survey data that can be applied to other social and behavioural research data. The goal of this guide and set of workflows presented is to improve librarians’ and data curators’ skills in providing access to high-quality, well-documented, and reusable research data. The aspects of data curation that are addressed throughout this guide are adopted from long-standing data library and archiving practices, including: documenting data using standard metadata, file and data organization; using open and software-agnostic formats; and curating research data for reuse

Integrative Graph File Systems

---The main concept of the proposed Integrative Graph File Systems is based on bidirectional relationship between two objects (bidirectional linking). The main features are up-to-date links, no broken references, and improved organization of existing file hierarchy. Nowadays, it is hard to maintain the variety of a constantly increasing number of files. Over time, even a simple file can be lost in the deep hierarchy of user files. With the work proposed here, it is possible to prevent such a loss by offering different ways to traverse the hierarchies while still ending up at the same file. This method is similar to tagging. The work allows the user to easily place a single file in multiple locations on meta-info level and quickly find the incoming links. Thus, the user always knows all objects which are pointing to the target and vice-versa. All basic file operations are supported (like delete, move or rename). The main goals of this work are to prove the possibility of the existence of integrative file systems with bidirectional linking and to show the advantages of such a feature. Integration means the possibility to use such a file system with the standard file operation and exploration tools available in current operating systems. The work analyzes and evaluates research of similar approaches and presents an own solution, based on the FUSE (File system in User Space) extension platform. This solution is applied to several example scenarios. The design supports other add-on modifications to the current system, allowing the extension of the project to unify and sort different data in a graph based file system. As this is an integrative approach, no explicit user interface will be provided. The future work will hint at possible extensions to a collaborative multi-user file system, which assumes the combination of local space and different network or cloud based data providers

Economic and social foundations of collective action : an inter-disciplinary institutional approach to Mexican dairy farmers

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on February 13, 2008)Thesis (Ph. D.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2007.This research uses an interdisciplinarian neo-institutional approach to examine formal and informal institutional factors that influence dairy farmers' ideas about participation in collective action in the "Altos Sur" region in Jalisco, Mexico. Data collected from face-to-face interviews of a sample of 100 dairy farmers was used to measure and analyze formal and informal factors that influence these dairy farmers' decisions about collective action; whether or not to join other dairy farmers to produce milk in a collective way. This research tests hypotheses not only on dairy farmers' perceptions of formal institutions such as the state, the market and the economic organization, but also on their perceptions of informal institutions such as bonding and bridging social capital which might have influenced them to participate in collective action. Results of this research indicate that these dairy farmers' motivations to go into entrepreneurial collective action were influenced by both formal and informal institutional perceptions. Perceptions of formal institutions that affected willingness to engage in collective action include views about government responsibilities and duties in the milk industry; perceptions of the functionality of an economic organization, and perceptions of market functionality. The surveys also show that farmers' perceptions of bonding social capital had a more significant influence than bridging social capital on whether or not they were encouraged to participate in collective action. These findings are discussed in relation to the larger issue of whether collective entrepreneurial action can mediate market failure that is exacerbated by globalization.Includes bibliographical reference

Leadership influence on teacher support teams in high poverty elementary schools

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on March 7, 2011).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Cynthia MacGregor.Vita.Ed. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2010.The increased accountability to schools and districts to meet federal standings has lead to commencing systematic approaches to the needs of all students. In order for teachers to be able to facilitate instructional strategies that are differentiated and functional for all students they must receive leadership and support. The importance of expertise and leadership in the educational process is paramount, for there is more power in a leadership model and not necessarily in a model that designs its own standards. This need for expertise and leadership has lead to collaboration among general and special education experts, as well as the students' families, achieves an integrated and effective approach in response to struggling learners. First supported by senior administration in school districts, the Teacher Support Team (TST) initiative relied upon a selected team within each school to show what it can achieve for students. This leads to the significance of distributive leadership in the TST and creating relational trust by allowing those in the organization to take leadership roles and distribute the leadership appears to be imperative. This allows for greater participation in the organization, as well as greater morale and a relieved workload for the leader. It also encourages leadership in the organization, which benefits the organization as a whole. The overall purpose of this study was to establish a connection between the role of distributed leadership and the impact of TSTs on elementary students of high poverty. To achieve this, information was gathered from high poverty elementary schools in the Sunnyside Public School District. The study examined key respondents' perceptions on the leadership within the TST. A mixed method of gathering both qualitative and quantitative data was chosen as the most appropriate approach to collect the data. The project began by the researcher contacting six high poverty elementary schools within the Sunnyside Public Schools and requesting their participation in the research project. The purpose of narrowing the research to schools that serve a high poverty population is to ensure similarities within the students and communities. Each TST was made up of the building administrator, a TST coordinator, and other teachers as noted by the team. Each team was provided an opportunity to participate in the research activity and it was assured the data was anonymous and not reflective of employment performance or used as an evaluative tool. The approach to the design was a mixed methods research study. Based on the data gathered via a survey, quantitative information was gathered in order to address the research questions. In additional to the quantitative approach, a qualitative aspect was analyzed. This mixed methods approach was chosen due to the potential to discover true meaning to the research questions. It was also anticipated the mixed methods approach would allow for further research designs to come to the forefront. Descriptive analyses were preformed to support the research questions and sub-parts to the research questions. Finding of this study displayed both favorable and less favorable confidence in the leadership of the TST coordinator and the TST itself. The concerns of the TST coordinator and the TST itself were focused on time being wasted, weak leadership, and teachers who were frustrated with the results of the TST process.Includes bibliographical reference

Tool for Correlating EBSD and AFM Data Arrays

Ceramic and semiconductor research is limited in its ability to create holistic representations of data in concise, easily-accessible file formats or visual data representations. These materials are used in everyday electronics, and optimizing their electrical and physical properties is important for developing more advanced computational technologies. There is a desire to understand how changing the composition of the ceramic alters the shape and structure of the grown crystals. However, few accessible tools exist to generate a dataset with the proper organization to understand correlations between grain orientation and crystallographic orientation. This paper outlines an approach to analyzing the crystal structure using data collected from atomic force microscopy (AFM) and electron backscattered diffraction (EBSD) scans to build an accurate image of the crystal structure and orientation in the ceramic. The following tool takes data from AFM and EBSD scans of the same surface to create an accessible and easily-manipulatable data organization that stores several parameters relating to the crystallographic information of the surface. While this code was tested using on barium strontium titanate, but can of other materials with crystalline surfaces can take advantage of this analysis tool

Analysis of Effects of Sensor Multithreading to Generate Local System Event Timelines

In practice, organizations with their own information technology infrastructure normally log or otherwise monitor network information at boundary routers and similar network devices that are log-capable. However, not all organizations opt to log local system information, such as an employee\u27s organization-owned workstation activity. This research explores one approach to logging pertinent local system information using multithreading and free software designed for such logging purposes as well as utilities that come with the Microsoft Windows 7 Operating System. Research focuses on file downloads on the local system and combines the aforementioned pieces of software into an event logging suite. The event logging suite consists of four different sensors and utilizes multithreading in an attempt to effectively capture as many pertinent events as possible, with the ultimate goal of capturing 100% of the events in chronological order of actual occurrence. Specifically, the event logging suite increases the number of processes and thus threads that two of the four sensors, Windows NETSTAT and tasklist utilities respectively, in the suite execute in order to determine the optimal settings for the two sensors. To add some realism to the experiments, this research implements three different system loads to simulate user activity on the system while a scripted file-download scenario executes and the logging suite actively captures events. Ultimately, the performance accuracies of the NETSTAT and tasklist sensors across numerous tests show that while the sensors can capture above 85% of the expected number of events, neither are capable of consistently achieving this accuracy, even under a low system load

A case study of the management development program in one medium-to-large U.S. corporation, using Tyler's framework

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the training and development program in one medium-to-large American company had been developed using the framework prescribed by Ralph Tyler (1949). The focus was on the approach used by that company to add, delete, change, and structure individual courses for the total program. The study was based on findings in the literature that 1) management training and development (MD) programs are necessary but costly, yet are often being developed through random or other nonsystematic means; 2) company executives prefer a systematic approach to other means; 3) Tyler's framework, an example of the systematic approach, is the method most suitable and preferred. The research procedure used was a case study. Formal interviews were conducted, using a structured interviewing outline developed for this study, with the firm's curriculum developer, two subject matter experts, two participants, and a staff manager. Data were also obtained from the researcher's observation of and participation in a company-sponsored training session, from his review of training documents on file in the company's training organization, and from informal conversations with employees

HOW DO MARKET AND ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS AFFECT QUALITY OF CARE: MAMMOGRAPHY FOLLOW-UP RATE

A mammogram follow-up rate investigates the rate of initial mammograms that require a follow-up visit to confirm breast cancer. The ideal mammogram follow-up rate for an organization is 10%. Rates below mean organizations are underperforming the scan and missing possible cancer cases; above means that hospitals are overdoing mammograms. Previous research examined the problem in a micro-level approach focusing on patient and provider level factors. Open systems theory views the problem from a macro-level approach showing the components and how they interact with each other and their environments. The objectives of this study include reviewing how open systems theory can be used to understand the components affecting hospitals mammography follow-up rates, and examining market and organizational factors are associated with hospitals or counties meeting the recommendation, and understand how the guarantor in open systems theory changed the system between 2010 and 2016. We merged three datasets: Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Area Health Resource File, and the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. We performed multinomial logistic regressions to analyze what market and organizational factors affect the follow-up rate. We conducted t-tests and sign tests to provide a profile of hospitals that changed recommended meeting status between 2010 and 2016. Our results showed that open systems theory is underutilized and has the capability to be included in future research on public health problems. Our findings showed that counties were less likely to meet the recommendation if they had more deaths per 100,000 population, more radiologists per 100,000 population, a higher percentage of screening hospitals, and higher percent of African Americans. Organization level factors that affected quality of care included hospital ownership and region where hospitals that were private/not-for-profit, government funded, or in the Western region were more likely to meet the recommendation compared to hospitals that were for-profit or in the Northeast. The guarantor results showed no significant findings between 2010 and 2016 for organizational and market level factors. Future research should focus on open systems and viewing the problem in a macro-level approach in market and organization level factors in relation to their effect on quality of care